Posts Tagged houston techfest

I’ve taken a break from doing presentations in the last two years or so, and a lot of people have been asking me when I’d come out and develiver a talk again. Time has come! 🙂

I’ll be speaking at the Houston Tech Fest on September 28, and also at the Tulsa Tech Fest on October 11. I’m looking forward to both conferences, as I’ve had a great time presenting at both in the past.

Want to build software? Get your act together first!

Software developers are supposed to create applications that make people’s life easier, automating tedious tasks, encouraging users to get their work done, organizing complex workflows into digestible information and actions, helping them separate the most important information from the least important. But still, most developers forget to automate their own boring tasks. We forget to organize our information. We sometimes use tools that do not help us get our work done.

So how can we build software that fits our client needs, if we don’t understand those needs ourselves?

This session is NOT about software development; this session is about things we can do and tools we can use to organize ourselves, so we can free up our minds to more important things. Tools covered in this session include (but not limited to) Evernote, application launchers, screen capture tools, tablets, smartphones, etc.

Adventures of a .NET developer in Rails land

After several years of working almost exclusively with .NET, I started looking into Ruby on Rails; different language, framework, tools, mindset. In this session I go over the findings that were important to me, the main source of difficulties, what resources were helpful, the things I enjoyed the most, etc. Attendees to this session will learn what they need to know in order to get started developing Rails apps, or at least learn things that might help them approaching things in a different way when doing .NET development.

Software Development is a Joke!

Several of my technical presentations introduce some kind of humor, but sometimes people end up learning the joke and not the concept. So I decided to do a humor presentation based on software development, introduce some technical stuff, and see what I get!

After so many years writing software, I can’t help but laugh at so many (good and bad!) experiences myself and other developers have had. Not to mention things that just can’t make sense to normal people: how can this ?[A-Z0–9._%+-]+@[A-Z0–9.-]+.[A-Z]{2,4}$ be called a “regular” expression? (If you know by heart what that expression means, you are probably the kind of people who willl try to explain to me why zero-based arrays are kinda cool… please, just don’t!).

F-bombs may be dropped, but let’s be honest, you drop them yourself when it’s 5pm on Friday and that code insists not to work, don’t you?

I’ve had a great time presenting at Houston TechFest 2010. The sessions I’ve paired with JB and George went really well, and the Virtual Brown Bag session worked out great. Thanks everybody who attended to those sessions.

We’d really appreciate if you could take a minute or two and rate the sessions, along with giving us some feedback, so we can improve them in the future. You’ll find the material to be downloaded at those links too!

Houston TechFest is upon us again! It’s free, it’s filled with tons of sessions, I hear people say there’s going to be ping-pong… (ok, I digress…). If you’re in the Houston area, or within driving distance (or if you just like flying), make sure to attend to this event.

I’ll be there involved with 4 sessions that I’m totally looking forward to:

Design Patterns

Design Patterns are often used every day by every developer in one way or another. A basic understanding of patterns and how to implement them is very useful for all .NET developer, and this session tries to clarify design patterns in a way that everybody can understand and start thinking about patterns in a more natural way. Attendees will learn: The definitions of some of the main patterns, how patterns improve code quality, how to implement and use the patterns. covered such as Command, Observer, Adapter, Strategy, Factory, etc.

This is NOT the same session I’ve been doing for year; I’ll be doing this session with my buddy Jonathan Birkholz (aka JB), and we created all new material from scratch.

Virtual Brown Bag

Introduction to the Virtual Brown bag online sessions.

The Virtual Brown Bag has come long ways since I started year over a year and a half ago. It’s been growing a steady regular attendance, we’ve incorporated a wiki, we’re publishing all the recordings online just a few hours after the meetings end, and we continue working on improving our experience there. At the Houston TechFest, we’ll be giving people a quick introduction at what the Virtual Brown Bag is all about, and will pretty much do a “live virtual brown bag” right then and there, sharing the top things people learned since we started, and whatever else comes up there. Several “VBBers” are going to be there, including myself, JB, George Mauer, Jared Lobberecht, and other VBBers.

Synchronized Development for Distributed Teams

EPS Software/CoDE Consulting has a highly distributed team with developers in Houston, New Orleans, Knoxville, and Sao Paulo all working on overlapping parts of the same project. This talk, developed by George Mauer and Claudio Lassala for Houston Techfest 2010 will cover some of the tools and techniques used to keep the team synchronized and working together toward a common goal.

I’m excited about this session too. I’ll be doing this one with my buddy, co-worker, and VBBer, George Mauer. We’ve been working together for several months now, and we thought we should share some of our experiences with other people.

Tips and Tricks to Boost Productivity

Any serious developer must have settings, tools, habits, and anything that can boost productivity. This session goes through a list of things that can shave off precious seconds, minutes, or even hours, allowing one to devote more time to other important things. From shortcuts to tools, through best practices in writing and refactoring code and setting up your environment, we’ll cover as much as possible on the time allocated for the session. Attendees will learn how to get things done faster, shortcuts, tools, habits that can improve productivity, practices to improve your code so that both you and others spend less time maintaining it. Life is short, so make the most out of it

This is one of my favorite sessions. Very laidback, and totally focused on my real life experiences.

So that’s it: make sure to register for the conference (have I mentioned it’s FREE?), and I hope to see you there. Make sure to stop by and say hi!

Oh, and to finish off a great day, after the conference is over I’ll be heading out to catch Nevermore’s gig at Numbers. That’s my favorite metal band, and it’s been 5 years since I saw them live in Austin, so I’m totally looking forward to that too! 🙂